The Battle of Midway - Myths, Legends and Greatness (with Jon Parshall)

[Music] hello everybody and welcome to another video we are going to be interviewing another special guest this week uh this week we're going to be talking to one half of the author team behind the wonderful book shattered sword if you haven't read it um why not you should be ordering a copy right now there is a image of it popping up on the screen if you happen to be able to recognize it and if not i'll put some links to the various us uk etc distributors in the description below so to to end these inevitable suspense this is uh john partial and uh we're going to be discussing a little bit more about the details of midway because i'm sure many of you have heard the battle told and retold countless ways um we perhaps with some varying levels of accuracy depending on the media format um but there there are a few things that perhaps are less talked about when it comes to midway and that's what we're going to try and cover today so um in introducing john partial thank you very much for joining me delighted to be here so um we're going to follow the same kind of format that we normally do with these videos so we have a list of questions which will loosely guide what we're talking about i make no promises about random tangents or diversions it is the inevitable way of things um but uh we will i guess we'll start off then if that's okay yeah okay so let's start with the the first question um so given that obviously midway is not the first big carrier battle the us navy is involved with in the second world war the first that's being obviously coral sea so given the overall outcome of the battle of the coral sea which i think is fair to say it's it's a strategic victory they managed to get the japanese to turn around but it is a tactical defeat because they lose lexington and yorktown's badly damaged the japanese don't come off anywhere nearly as badly what's the mood of the us navy going into midway you know i think that it's sort of hard to characterize the mood of an entire uh institution as large as the u.s navy at that point i think that you have to put it in the context of of some of the other events that have already been occurring around the same time i mean uh just the day before coral sea was fought of course corregidor finally surrenders and the you know the last remnants of the philippines are going uh down into uh the darkness and and i think that it's it's worth just stating that the mood in general uh in the middle of 1942 is incredibly dark that this has been an awful run for the allies um not just the americans but you know the british and and the dutch as well you know everything has just fallen pieces in the pacific at this point uh the allied strategic position has just been ripped to shreds uh the british have suffered you know calamitous defeats in malaya and finally the the surrender of singapore and and frankly the campaign in burma is is going just as pear-shaped as well so it's easy for us to sit here at 75 remove you know years remove and sort of look back and say well i know how the story ends so it couldn't have been that bad but i'm here to tell you if you look at some of the um the eyewitness recollections from that year you know from anybody lord alan brook eisenhower even nimitz at this point there's a fair amount of um foreboding about how the trajectory of this war is going so great we we managed to stave off a japanese advance against port moresby coral sea where does that leave the navy i think that broadly speaking the navy still believes in its capabilities as a fighting force and particularly i think the carrier aviators aboard our various aircraft carriers believe with some reason that they're a pretty elite force and that they haven't really necessarily been tested um full force against the japanese so i think that on the one hand you've got uh some trepidation about this upcoming battle at midway that you know now they're being rushed into but at the same time i think that if you were to talk to guys like richard best or wade mccluskey or some of the other squadron leaders on these ships they they would give you a fair amount of assurance that we know what we're doing and if we can get a good target in our sights we'll be able to follow through on that okay so yeah so kind of yeah i guess the the the on the front line there there's probably spoiling for a fight you know in a lot of ways but at the higher echelons that's what going ninja's not going quite as well as we thought it would yeah it's not going well at all i do think you're right that they're certainly in the at the squadron level the aviator level uh there are a lot of people in the ranks who are just absolutely itching for payback against the japanese um and yet at the same time at that same level um certainly there's talk in the torpedo plane squadrons for instance that you know we know that we're flying a relatively outdated airframe here and i don't know that my personal odds of survival in this upcoming fray are necessarily all that good which unfortunately turned out to be the case yeah so so go speaking about those air groups in a little bit more detail when it actually comes time for the battle so with the us air groups with uh hornet yorktown and enterprise it takes a fair bit of time for them to actually get their strike groups airborne um compared to the japanese so was there any specific reason for this an operational reason and if so did they identify a good way to fix that yeah the the real issue uh that's going on here it's less a problem for yorktown yorktown's package actually goes off pretty cleanly and and the reason for that is that they don't have to break their spot in other words they do a deck load strike they put up a squadron of dive bombers a squadron of torpedo planes and some fighters an escort and so they're able to put that entire package in one spot on the flight deck problem with hornet and yorktown or enterprise excuse me are that they're trying to basically put up the full meal deal you know i'm launching all of my planes and that unfortunately means that i've got to send a portion of them up and then bring up the remainder from the hanger decks get them spotted and send them off as well and that turns out to be a real problematic affair and so you're absolutely right it does take uh in case of both of those carriers almost an hour to get their uh air groups up and in the air and that leads to you know just all sorts of problems in terms of strike coordination then that um in the middle of that realizing that you know some of these planes are they're burning precious gas while they're waiting for you know for their mates to come on up to them they you know send these squadrons off on their way and i forget the exact number of different formations of aircraft that were flying around but it was probably on the order of six or seven you know in squadron-sized packets out there looking for the japanese fleet um and then furthermore you have the disintegration of hornet's air group where the commander of the torpedo plane squadron john waldron decides that the you know the course they're taking is not the course they should be taking and he actually splits his squadron off and goes looking for the japanese separately so yorktown was the more experience of the of the three flight decks that were there and so i think it's it's pretty clear that her operations were a little more slick than uh that enterprise and hornets um but to an extent i think some of those problems have even been sort of worked out by the time you get to the afternoon strikes against hear you that they well there were of course there were fewer american aircraft left by that juncture in the battle but we also were a little less ambitious and just put deck like deck load strikes up on those decks and got them off in the air um you don't see as much of that sort of behavior in some of the later carrier battles like eastern solomon's and and santa cruz uh those strike packages seem to go up a lot more cleanly uh than you did in midway in the morning and even though this is not the first carrier battle that we fought at midway it's it's still only the second right and i think that that's another thing that it's it's difficult for people to sort of get their heads around that at this point in time the the sort of playbook that people are using for carrier operations is mighty thin you know this this really is sort of the wild west of naval weapons systems here at this point and it's a book that is literally being written as we go as to how we conduct these sorts of battles so i guess i'm not too terribly surprised uh that both of those carriers had as many problems as they did just getting their strike packages up yeah yeah i mean i was i was looking back through some of the histories of some of the fleet problems they were doing in the 30s and the massive preponderance of things like laying smoke screens for to cover destroyer attacks in a surface action and things like that as you say it's like this is not they're not fighting the war that they thought they were going to be fighting in the 30s yeah and so sorry i was just going to say i think the one thing that also gets lost on people um there have been a lot of sort of uh what do i want to say expose facto analyses of midway and even some critiques of of spruance and fletcher the two commanders there that you know they didn't they didn't follow nimitz's battle plan as precisely as they should have and they should have had their carriers precisely here and launched it precisely these times and they would have been able to you know scupper nagumo without any losses i i think that people fail to realize that at this point in the development not only of the carrier as a weapons platform but also just the nature of communications in this war the nature of reconnaissance in this war at this time that just getting too carrier fleets to roughly the same location in the ocean such they could even do battle was doing pretty good you know and particularly when it comes to matters of reconnaissance and that sort of thing you know we have the benefit now i i would guess that a lot of us probably couldn't make it to the grocery store and back without you know siri whispering in our ear and telling us where to go and these guys didn't have any of that stuff you know i'm taking off from a flight deck my navigational systems are the compass that's in the dashboard of my plane i've got a paper map that's the size of my thigh pad i've got a pencil i've got a ruler maybe a you know a protractor or something like that that's how i'm navigating and i'm in the middle of the pacific you know so it's it was really difficult for planes to get from point a to point b and then make it back to point a again after they've done their business and likewise the the pilots that are out there doing reconnaissance missions they only have the vagus idea where they actually are so if you look at the sighting report that tony's number four scout you know sends back to nagumo saying i've sighted american carriers it's off by something like 70 miles you know so the the whole the whole picture should be one of confusion in a lot of cases outdated communications and very the machinery of battle is still really raggedy particularly on the american side when it comes to doing these deck operations yeah when i mean when it comes to reconnaissance i'm reminded of one of the previous incidents that goomba was involved with with the the indian ocean raid um and i was looking at a map of midway and i realized when you've got somerville and his carriers and nagumo and his carriers and if you superimpose where the british carriers were during that operation onto a map of midway you would have had the british cares passing almost not quite but almost halfway between where the american and the japanese carriers actually were on the day but in that instance apart from one albacore that got shot down rather quickly because it was an albacore um um the uh neither side had any clue where they were so the fact that this engagement at midway is even happening that they even even have a vague idea where they are so they've already overcome quite a big hurdle right and that actually i think speaks to another issue that that uh is difficult for the modern reader in many cases to understand i mean um we broke the japanese codes right that's why we know that the japanese carrier force is going to show up we think on this date at roughly this position and we have this sort of modern presupposition that if i know that the enemy is coming i win the battle you know i've got this information in my hands i should be able to win it was very very difficult to translate um strategic level intelligence on enemy intentions into battlefield level effectiveness at the tactical level um and and i find intriguing parallels between that and the performance of eighth army in the western desert during the year 1942 you know guys like awk achenlec and montgomery in many cases had really good intelligence coming at them from ultra as to what rommel was going to be doing but if you don't have the doctrinal and tactical wherewithal to translate that intelligence into meaningful results on the battlefield you still can't win yeah um so i know we mentioned it briefly but with hornets air group obviously um the actual the big strike that hits the japanese is made up of yorktown and enterprises aircraft showing up at roughly the same time but hornets air group doesn't really feature all that much in that in that action because it just goes wandering off on its own little mission um so was it literally just a case of one of the squadron commanders going actually i don't think the guys on the ship had it right i'm just off in whatever way i'm going yeah there are elements of that this is the infamous flight to nowhere where hornet launches her air group and there's been a lot of discussion around did that group miss nagumo to the north by flying a course that was basically due west or did hornets group fly far to the southwest and miss it to the south i'm firmly convinced that it flew to the north of nagumo and went on a straight basically 265 or 270 degree course i think what's going on there and this has never been you know documented but when i talk to you know guys like john lundstrom and and also um uh craig simons who's also written a good book on on midway the the sense that we all have is that mitcher who's the commander of hornet who is an old line carrier aviator and has just recently got his ticket punched to rear admiral he knows he's going to make admiral after this battle i don't think he particularly likes working for a guy like fletcher who is not an aviator by trade and the pre-battle intel estimates that are coming back to these guys are that the japanese are going to be operating in two task forces they're sort of mirror imaging you know the americans are going to be operating in two task forces and so the the they feel that the japanese are going to be doing the same none of the spotting reports that have come back to them thus far have seen any more than two aircraft carriers out there and so it is our supposition that mitcher is saying there's got to be another task force out there and if there is one it's probably trailing the one that we've spotted and therefore that would put it north of the one that we've spotted and that's where i'm gonna go um so he tells his air group commander stan hope ring i want you to take your air group and go out and look for this other mythical second task force and that's the result or the the reason for this you know enormous snafu um that never gets admitted to in the after battle reports and there's a lot of sort of mystery around that as well i think that part of what's going on there is that hornet doesn't really want to admit to just how badly things have gone and to raise the notion that you know you look at john waldron's actions during the battle where he takes vt8 and goes off to the southwest looking for the japanese by himself i mean he has a fight in the air on the radio with his superior officer and is insubordinate and goes off and okay he's right you know he finds the japanese he's the only group from hornet that does but he gets himself killed in his entire command in the process do you really want to bring that up in the after battle report you know do you really want to raise this ugly issue that this entire squadron emulated themselves as a result of an insubordinate act in the context of the larger air group doing nothing meaningful you know so i think there's just a lot of just like let's just not talk about this you know and hope that this problem goes away but you'll notice that after the battle spruance and nimitz expressly say that if you've got questions and details between enterprises report and hornets report believe enterprises report which says that spruance thinks that mitcher cooked that report yeah so what i think is going on there fair enough yeah i suppose it's yeah i suppose as you say there's all so many different reasons for doing that and everything from wanting to make not make it look like various animals are just going off doing their own things um all the way down to as you say the the one squadron that gets wiped out it's probably much better for morale to say yes they went in they fought with that with their comrades from the other carriers and they lost their lives doing so rather than they got themselves killed because they didn't listen to orders right right yeah well it and that feeds into a larger theme around vt-8 in general i mean throughout this the historiography of this battle there's always been this myth that well vth sacrifice was tragic but you know it dragged the zeros down to water level and that you know sort of opened the way for the dive bombers you know to do their thing the problem with that is that vt8 was completely and utterly destroyed by about 0 9 35 in the morning and the dive bombers aren't going to show up until 10 20 you know but basically 50 minutes later i got news for you you know your average zero can climb from sea level to 15 000 feet in about seven minutes flat you know and so that means that the sacrifice of vt-8 is not around dragging the zeros down to deck level really what vta does is by taking 20 minutes off the clock if you will he they back foot nagumo and prevent nagumo from doing any sort of spotting operations during that window of opportunity so they take time off the clock um that's a pretty tragic way to have to take time off that clock though yeah yeah and also i suppose that leads into our next question talking about the japanese spotting their aircraft on the deck so for decades we have this what we now know to be a myth but the story um in a lot of older books and even in some films of this packed flight decks of the japanese carriers and that's from what i understand largely based on a single account by one japanese navy guy who who happened to have been there and apparently the rest of the japanese historians didn't believe in the slightest um so did any of the us navy pilots are actually making these attacks when they're making their after action reports do they actually come back with any observations whether as to whether or not these flight decks had lots of aircraft on them one way or the other um and if so how did their testimony come to be ignored in favor of a loan account from the other side right right um yeah it's a really complex question and i think the first thing you have to bear in mind that you know if you are the pilot of an american dive bomber diving from you know 15 to 17 000 feet in this roller coaster ride down to the to the decks below you are being shot at this entire time so there's flack coming up at your windscreen that's not very fun um and the other thing is too and i don't want to denigrate our our flying brethren but um aviator accounts in general are often taken with a large grain of salt uh as to what pilots thought they saw or thought they shot down or what have you i and so then if you actually take a look at the american aviator accounts it's a real mixed bag some of them say that yeah i saw planes on the flight deck but in many cases you don't know if that's what they think they saw right after the action itself or is this a recollection sometime in the 1970s when oh you know fujita's book that came out in 1955 said our flight decks were packed memory is a really malleable thing and you know if you start reading other other accounts from the other side that are telling you this it's like oh yeah that's what i saw you know on the other hand you get accounts from guys like richard best who were like i saw very few aircraft on the flight deck on my way down um and so and and that i think squares precisely with what we think was on the japanese flight tax tony and i never said that there weren't planes on the japanese flight decks there certainly were but they were all fighters and they were combat air patrol fighters and so i would expect in the course of that dive bomber attack as a pilot that yeah i would have seen three planes maybe six planes something like that up on those flight decks but there were not the massive numbers of strike planes bombers on the flight deck and for that you know we we sort of uh resorted to really a mathematical exercise and the bottom line is that if you're going to bring a group of aircraft up to the flight deck get those puppies warmed up get the pilots in there you know yadda yadda yadda the mechanics of that take at a minimum uh you know 35 minutes maybe 40 45 is probably more like it and during that time the whole flight deck is shut down and i've got to be warming up my engines and so forth and so on we have uh direct deck logs for macagi for instance where akagi lands three planes we know at 10 10 and she's bombed at 10 27 so i've got 17 minutes you know to have hypothetically put up her entire strikeforce on deck the math just doesn't work and i really think that's sort of the the sort of the critical point in our argument it's not uh well this guy saw this but that guy saw that kind of account we're really saying show me how your math works show me how you can get a strike force up there and ready to go in 15 minutes you can't so that's the basis yeah makes perfect sense to me to be perfectly honest i mean apart from anything else that's all the the little uh sarcastic engineer inside me said sort of says well if if the entire strike group and all those of its weapons and fuel were all on the flight deck and the bombs went down into the hangar deck what exactly did they cook off down there because it was all up there up on top but yeah you know these ships these were 1920s era warships and one of the things that my friend uh chuck haberline who used to work at the navy historical center pointed out was that we really don't have a good understanding of just how vulnerable these things were to fire because the japanese and the americans at that time didn't have an understanding of just how vulnerable warships were to shock damage so for instance the fact that a lot of the the water pipes for the fire fighting systems were cast iron you know any sort of a bomb detonation anywhere near that is going to shatter those pipes like their glass so even if there hadn't been strike planes down in the hangars just the fact that the fuel system was in operation probably would have meant at least for some of these carriers that um you know that they were their goose was cooked literally uh regardless of where those planes were located yeah yeah so um yeah speak speaking of carriers that rather unfortunate end obviously on the u.s side you have yorktown it's obviously it's coming out of the out of pearl harbor with patch up repairs it's not quite able to make its full speed um but when the japanese attack yorktown it's still as with the its sister ship hornet later on it still takes one heck of a hammering to actually put it under in multiple stages at what stage along the line of the various assaults it undertake it gets hit by is yorktown pretty much irrevocably doomed or so when the aircraft when all the aircraft have left and all is said and done if she hadn't been then subsequently followed up by the submarines could she have been saved at that point absolutely um i'm convinced that that she would have made it home had it not been for uh the torpedoes of of i-168 that did her in a couple days after the battle the yorktown's as a class were fabulous ships very very damage resistant and and i yes she was she was listing heavily but the flooding had largely been contained and the fact that they were sending a fleet tug to drag her out of there i don't think she was in any imminent danger of sinking but tanabe's submarine does her in and you know as soon as those torpedoes hit well then yeah it is game over yeah yeah i must say so obviously hornet is the other yorktown that gets sunk and recently when i've been looking into the gradle canal campaign so everyone gives up on it because they think it's it's doomed um and then they send the destroyers in and the destroyers do some hit it with some more torpedoes and some shells and horns they're going no i'm sinking on my own schedule thank you very much and they have to leave because the japanese are literally over the horizon and then the japanese find it and it's like why is this thing still here yeah and they finally are the ones that polish her off but yeah they could absorb a tremendous amount of damage um yeah i look i look at hornet you know her final demise of course she's she would have been completely ruined even if she hadn't been sunk she had been completely burned out much like frankly some of the japanese carriers too you look at kaga um my god you know even if they've been able to tow her home that she'd have been worth nothing but razor blades at that point but yeah yes bottom line is you have to put water into these hulls or they don't go under fire alone won't do it in most cases yeah so um obviously the the japanese as they do in quite a number of these battles they have separate surface forces um apart from the carriers not serving in a direct escort role once all was said and done with the with the day's airstrikes were those japanese surface forces a credible threat to the remaining u.s carriers i don't think so um you know the bottom line is that as long as the american carrier commanders are successful in keeping themselves at arm's distance what can the japanese surface forces do to them i think you can make the argument that you know yamamoto might have decided to run the main body up to midway and bombard it i think that there is um you know just given the amount of damage that your typical battleship can absorb before finally being scuppered um and given the the damage that had been done to the air groups of the american carriers um one might make an argument that that surface force might have been able to survive in that in that air envelope for some amount of time but realistically speaking you know what are you gonna actually accomplish okay i go i go to midway i don't really have any sort of a formal gunfire support doctrine for getting my troops ashore if there's anything that late war americans learned from doing those sorts of bombardments of heavily fortified japanese islands it's that it takes a heck of a lot of gun power to do anything credible in days and days to days to do it so i i just don't think that the japanese would have been able to do anything meaningful off the island really i am highly skeptical that they would have been able to get an amphibious force even ashore let alone taken the place and even if they do take it they can't keep it in supply my sense is that yamamoto realized a number of those things at least at some level and it's sort of interesting when you look at what's going on on board the battleship yamato which is trailing behind nagumo's carriers by several hundred miles there are these sort of pitiful scenes in the middle of the night after the battle has been lost when the staff officers are grasping at any number of straws to try to you know is there some way that we can pull this thing back from the the brink of defeat and it really takes them until you know two or three in the morning before they finally realize that this just is not happening and it is finally yamamoto that becomes sort of the voice of reason with these younger staff officers and it's just basically like snap out of it guys the battle is lost you know you don't go fighting uh a fortress with with a warship like this it's just it's just not gonna work yeah yeah um and so i mean obviously that's i think we've talked about a number of perhaps the more commonly held myths or the most commonly held oh but they could haves of midway um but it is what would you say having obviously looked into it in so much detail what is the single biggest myth about midway that you'd like to dispel well we've already discussed uh one of them which is the whole myth around the flight decks and and that was that was something that that we didn't go into the book writing process uh to dispel uh we never wrote this book to to to you know like get fuchita that was never the the intent of this whole exercise it really was to just write a book about the japanese side of the battle and it wasn't until we were you know two or three years into the writing process that it kind of began dawning on us that you know this flight deck thing just doesn't seem to be holding together when you start looking at the air group records so that was one big myth to get rid of this this whole recasting of what was going on the flight decks i feel like the other one that is also really pernicious is just this whole notion of the overwhelming odds that the americans had to fight against to win this particular battle when i teach my course on this battle at the naval war college i've got a slide that shows all of the warships on the japanese side of the roster versus the american warships you know that are facing them and when you first start this whole slide out with all of the various formations that are running around in the pacific in some capacity either up in the aleutians or what have you you know the americans are absolutely very heavily outnumbered but when you start pulling away you know the aleutians battle force and the aleutians invasion force and the main body and the oilers and the you know this that and the other thing when you get down to the the forces that are at the tip of the spear on 4 june 1942 you know nagumo ships versus fletcher and spruance's ships it's you know the japanese are actually somewhat outnumbered it's i forget exactly 21 to 24 warships yes they have four carriers we only have three carriers but we also have you know the island of midway that can't be sunk they have 248 carrier aircraft we have 360 aircraft either land-based or carrier-based and so one of the things that i think makes this battle so back and forth during the morning is it really is a very closely matched affair and so i think we need to do away with this notion that the americans triumphed against overwhelming odds we were able to to pull it out because we had sufficient force at at the point of contact the japanese could have outnumbered us significantly if they brought it you know a composite air group aboard zuikaku or maybe put some of the other uh smaller carriers like ryujo or some of the other smaller ones light carriers into the mix but they didn't do it so yeah so um flipping the whole whole thing on its head a little bit um from single biggest myth to what do you think is your your favorite moment or or favorite part of the action in the in the whole battle for me the the cusp of the matter is during the the dive bomber attack itself when richard best who is the commander of uh bombing squadron six realizes that through miscommunication or something has gone wrong that both of enterprises squadrons are attacking kaga and that means that akagi is going to get off scot-free he's just had his dive spoiled by some of the other planes in scouting squadron 6 going down on on kaga and so he and two of his wingmen kind of you know pull out of their dives at the last minute best spots akagi and decides you know can't let this ship get away hustles over there uh with his you know tiny little command he's got three airplanes right and doctrine says that we're going to attack an enemy carrier i want a full squadron of 15 to 18 planes to go after this thing i've got three um but he is able to you know attack that ship successfully three planes come down three bombs come down one of them hits akagi and it's pretty clear that it's dick best bomb everything that i have heard from people that actually knew richard best and i missed meeting him myself by just the narrowest of margins he was a consummate professional um a very very good experienced pilot and so to me that is just emblematic of here's a guy who not only has the situational awareness to to understand the bigger picture of what it means to let this carrier get away but then can follow it up with consummate airmanship and tactical skill and actually put that puppy away that to me is is is the key um item in the battle you know that really seals the deal as far as making sure that the japanese carrier force is going to be destroyed right now yeah yeah it's oh yeah as you say it's uh i must be looking obviously looking more through the uh the ships aspect of things as i tend to do you do see that a lot with various admirals it's kind of like you you get a good admiral who's good in tactical command but has all the strategic awareness of a damp noodle um and and you get some who can they can sort of they can do five-dimensional chess with the with the enemy's fleet and they can get them exactly where they want them but when it comes to the actual battle their attitudes kind of um shoot them maybe um and it's only the great admirals who were able to anticipate what the enemy is going to do and then take the action right to them um and that's a consistency through history and i guess it is a richard best is he's the m and equivalent of of having both the strategic and the tactical skill absolutely yeah i would agree with that um so obviously um unfortunately obviously yorktown is lost although it takes an awful lot to put her down especially compared to what happened to lexington at coral sea so how far exactly had us navy damage control and damage control procedures come since coral sea um because i mean i've personally been i've been looking just immediately after the guadalcanal eastern solomon santa cruz one thing i'm i've noticed especially looking at enterprises after action reports is that the action report is a page or two and then there's almost a small book on here's all the things that could have been done better and here's how to solve it was there that same kind of jump from coral sea to midway um i think the most important innovation uh has to do with the fuel systems but let me speak to that larger issue because i i think you are absolutely on the money when you talk about the amount of space that the americans devote to here's all the stuff we should have done better i think one of the most interesting aspects of this whole time period during the war is that on the one hand you have the the japanese who have been triumphant everywhere they have gone and yet don't seem to have learned a tremendous amount about the weapons system that they've created and on the other hand you got the americans who are in the middle of this horrific run of six months in the opening stages of the pacific where we're just getting our butts kicked it's horrible and the americans are frantically adapting to this new threat environment that they find themselves in and i think that one of the things that the us navy does best during this whole war is just learn learning how to learn and in fact you know a plug for a friend's book trent hohn has come out with a new book called learning war which talks about mostly the surface combat and the solomons and just again the same theme of how do you take a learning organization like the navy and promote a culture that makes it okay to say you know we did this wrong this long and this wrong um and the bottom line is that now if you fast forward to the late war period and take a look at what the u.s navy knows as compared to frankly any other navy in the world certainly with respect to damage control there's just there's just no comparison that was one of the things that i found most amusing during my research was looking at the navy technical report after the war they sent teams over to japan to interview naval officers and you know we wanted to learn everything there was to know about the japanese navy your guns your sonar your torpedoes especially your torpedoes when you get to damage control it's this thin little booklet and there's this disparaging comment in the first part of it that says you know damage control as it was understood by the u.s navy did not exist in the imperial japanese navy anyway back to your original question what did we learn after coral sea i think the the most important event that happened there was the fuel officer on the yorktown a guy named oscar meyer of all of all things had you know during this battle watched as lexington burned to the waterline as the result of a fuel fire in her hangar deck and he looks at this you know inferno and it's just like i don't want this happening to my ship and gets this bright idea you know what would happen if we put co2 and inert gas into the the fuel lines on our fueling system he takes that to the damage control officer on yorktown he's like i got this idea what do you think and the dco is like sounds good to me let's try it out and by the time we get to midway a month later this is now you know standard operating procedure at least on yorktown had that innovation not occurred in that intervening time span i'm pretty certain that when she was dive bombed um she probably you know would have suffered catastrophic damage right then and there and would have been out of the fight almost immediately if that had happened it would have meant that the follow-on strike by the japanese torpedo planes instead of going after the already damaged yorktown might in fact have gone after your uh enterprise or hornet if they've been able to find them so the fact that your town was able to absorb that level of punishment and not suffer a catastrophic fire that speaks to a very high level of competency and damage control already and it was only gonna get better from there yeah and of course by not going up in an inferno it also meant although she was sunk a lot more of yorktown sailors got to go home at the end of the campaign for sure yeah look at some of the holocausts on um you know my god kaga loses you know 700 guys soryu loses 700 guys you know it's just it's just absolutely awful and yeah time gets off a lot a lot easier so um well the last question that we have listed is um with regards to admiral fletcher so of course he was theoretically never supposed to be there it was supposed to be admiral halsey in charge um except he got he got beached yeah well it was spruance really that was not supposed to be there because spruance really takes halsey's place but you're you're correct that the classic lineup would have been halsey and overall command fletcher running uh yorktown's flight deck um but yeah it ends up not happening yeah so do you think admiral fletcher being sort of stood in for halsey is he the best man for the job in this battle um and if he is why if he's not who do you think in the us's roster of admirals would have been a better one to put in his space yeah it's it's that's a really interesting question and and there's still a fair amount of debate about that i mean nimitz said that he was glad that halsey wasn't there because he was afraid that halsey would have been too aggressive and might have ended up running into some you know evil late night encounter with japanese surface forces um as a result of his wanting to be you know more proximate to the japanese carriers after the battle had been won whereas a cautious dude likes bruins is just like no no no no i'm gonna i'm gonna hold these people at arm's length i feel like fletcher um was a great pick overall i feel like uh fletcher's reputation as a carrier commander was clearly besmirched during the war um mostly frankly as as a result of his actions off of guadalcanal later on when he supposedly pulled his carriers out too soon and we can go into that i have a lot of fairly sarcastic things to say about richmond kelly turner in that respect but i feel like if you look at fletcher's overall record you have to say you know the guy fought three carrier battles during his tenure he won all three of them if you look at the ratio of forces exchanged he lost two carriers but sank six on the japanese side of the roster and the battles that he did fight were at absolutely crucial portions in the war you know um when the chips were really down and things were really dark you know to have pulled out those victories in the fashion that he did i think that he's an absolutely a splendid example and even though he was sort of an odd duck and that he wasn't an aviator i think he did very credibly indeed so i i see no reason to pull him out of command of any sort of a counterfactual midway okay yeah i mean i must admit that that was um that was pretty much my conclusion as well um i can't remember how long ago a few months months ago someone actually asked me like um who would i who i think that was it yeah i was talking about admiral cunningham versus admiral fletcher um and sort of who was the better commander i think yeah i think it was something like yeah if you'd taken fletcher at the time of midway and put him in charge of the mediterranean fleet and vice versa and the the comment i made was that looking at fletcher and how he commanded versus some of his uh contemporaries and colleagues in the u.s navy and i don't know how much of this you might agree with but it struck me that fletcher is incredibly calculating he he almost it's almost the way you look at his decisions to me it almost seems like he he almost has no emotion when it comes to his command decisions he's just looking at going this is the way to inflict absolute maximum damage on the enemy this is the way to preserve my forces as best i can bearing in mind the first goal and that is what i'm going to do he's not he doesn't go as he says there's nimitz was worried halls he might be he might he doesn't go yeah we've won let's go after them um but equally he's not going he's not going oh no the enemy run away he's just absolutely down the line of my duty is to destroy the enemy my next duty is to preserve my ships end of right yeah and and it's interesting you should mention that because nimitz issues extremely clear instructions to both of his carrier commanders that you are not to risk your forces unless you are in a position to inflict disproportionate damage to the enemy uh the underlying subtext i think is absolutely clear in that respect that you know if you get placed in a position where your carriers are in danger and you're not going to be able to do anything meaningful get out of there let the marines you know face up to a potential invasion that's what they're there for but it's not worth risking those carriers unless you can do something meaningful i think too if you look at his performance at midway and how he treats his subordinates um you know spruance is largely in control of the latter half of that battle and fletcher was perfectly capable if he had wanted to he's he's flying his his flag now in a cruiser after the yorktown has been put out of action he could easily have have sailed over to the other task force and hoisted his flag aboard hornet and said i'm in charge again and you know let's keep going but he realizes that spruance is running this battle perfectly competently and so he doesn't want to upset that apple cart and just kind of lets spruins continue to do his thing that to me bespeaks um a tremendous level of emotional maturity and the ability to delegate to trusted subordinates uh you know just get out of the way and let them do their thing yeah i i think he was i think he was a gentleman i think that he was also a very uh proficient warrior yeah from from what you described just there he's he's basically just going again it's like my job is to kill the enemy if my subordinates are killing the enemy great they i've traded them well yeah we're winning we're winning you know that's that's the important thing so yeah um so i mean we've if you don't mind we do have a few a little bit of time i guess maybe um so if we if we may take a small diversion off to guadalcanal which is obviously the next stage of the us carrier campaign i'm most interested to hear on uh hear your what you mention well you saw hinted at with your reflections on fletcher and turner and that whole situation yeah you know i i look at turner and i he was a tremendously capable individual he was also just a horrible human being and a you know kind of a barely functional alcoholic at late certainly later in the war turner ends up kind of stabbing fletcher in the back fletcher knew that there was gonna be a japanese reaction to the invasion of guadalcanal he's absolutely convinced of that and he knows that he can only keep his carriers off of guadalcanal for a certain amount of time before he needs to pull back and refuel them because he's absolutely convinced that there's going to be a follow-on carrier battle for this island he's absolutely right so he ends up sticking around for you know two days after the initial invasion and then you know late in the evening uh he turns around and begins heading back to his refueling point well what he doesn't know is that very same night during the battle of sabo island uh you know the allied cruiser force in iron bottom sound gets absolutely crushed and now you know the invasion forces that are still busily unloading supplies and are behind schedule not that turner has told anybody that um are now completely exposed to japanese attack turner basically propagates this myth that you know that flesher just turned tail and skedaddled out of there and down through the ages this has been a perennial thing with the u.s marine corps that we were abandoned at guadalcanal and that guy fletcher he left us here you know and and it it's tough even now to find anybody in in the us marine corps that will say anything good about the navy in general but certainly about you know uh fletcher in this context the thing that that i point out i'm working on a battle a book on 1942 none of this would have been an issue if turner's cruiser force hadn't gone and gotten itself blown out of the water in the first place no one would have cared right but really what i think is going on here is the turner is desperately looking around for scapegoats in fact one marine admiral shortly after the battle says that you know in no time at all uh turner was blaming everyone else except mother teresa for the defeat you know so he's desperately looking for scapegoats to deflect criticism from himself when the bottom line is that he was in command of the surface forces off of guadalcanal he had personally vetted all of the defense arrangements and you know the position of those various squadrons and you know um after the battle another admiral you know came out and said it has to be admitted that even though we knew that there was a force that might show up here and we had arranged our forces to repel them that in the event we were destroyed uh turn was never able to uh make that same level of of intellectual honesty stick and so i just i i don't have a lot of respect for richmond kelly turner is what it comes down to and i think that there are people who would say well yes but his contributions to the war you know made it such that he was indispensable and we had to have him and i'm like that is baloney when you start getting into a war of this size one of the things that i always stress is that the the great man theory of history kind of starts falling down right yes we look at practitioners like rommel and monstein and people like that and we say that they were indispensable this was not a war of people it was a war of systems okay and at the end of the day even if richmond kelly turner was not in command of those amphibious forces you know what there was somebody else in the pipeline that the u.s navy could have picked who would have been able to do that job at least as credibly and if there wasn't that speaks to a problem of our systems i'm absolutely confident that there was so yeah that's kind of my take on the warning i suppose he could he couldn't blame a poor old admiral crutchley because he just hauled him back away from these cruisers for a conference it was crutchly who actually made the the statement that i just that i just quoted that it has to be committed you know that we got blown out of the water i mean at least crutchly but the problem with crutchley he can't be the scapegoat because he's on loan and he has won the victoria cross in world war one i can't go after that guy he's you know he's not mind to blame so from turner's perspective you know the only guy i really can go after is is fletcher for cowardly you know moving his carriers off i suppose as well given that crutchley had been sort of the year year or two before he'd been captain of war spike sailing up in norwegian fjord to to blow up half of the norwegian landscape and a few destroyers they couldn't exactly try and say yes this guy was scared of action exactly yeah that's absolutely right that's absolutely right so yeah it just there's a fascinating group of characters obviously uh in all of these battles and and you do have some real interesting uh uh types of people running around turner's certainly one of the more interesting ones um you find that in any force right i mean there's always going to be some harassable sea dogs running around i mean obviously the u.s navy as a whole is run by ernest king who's not exactly a you know a ball of laughs at a party so um yeah yeah you get what you get yeah although i i have always said sorry if you if you was given a time travel machine and i could see the the 10 like 10 to 15 minutes of any time during world war two the one i'd probably want to be wanting to bring a very big bag of popcorn to would be uh admiral king's office when they finally ended up marching in the buford people who'd messed up the mark 14. that would have been an interesting interesting conversation i suspect has never been written down uncomfortable yeah for sure as for me you know time travel wise midway still remains on the top of my list i even now having written a book about it there's still a lot of things that i would actually want to be able to see with my own eyes we still don't have a good sense for what was going on down in the hangars of those carriers that that picture in my mind is even murkier now uh tony tully my co-author has maintained um a scholarly interest in the battle i i don't want to say i've moved on but i i do other things as well tony's really you know still drilled into midway very seriously and has unearthed additional japanese accounts that just speak to the level of chaos that was going on down in the hangar decks but if you were to ask me now you know do you think that those planes were actually even armed and ready to be lifted to the flight decks at the time of that attack i'd be like i don't know you know yeah probably pretty close but there's there's nothing definitive there and i think that that's one of the sort of the interesting things about studying battles like this you know even when you get really deep into the weeds is that we as historians are always dependent on the quality of the source material that we have available to us and we're constantly learning new things and that source material is changing and evolving um but i wrote one battle of this hist or history of this battle but i'm sure that you know 50 years from now some other person is going to substantially revise our account because they will have learned new things and that's cool you know that's that's the nature of the beast we should welcome that so um in terms of the obviously this this video um if we wrap up by just saying you've mentioned your you're writing a book on 1942 is there sort of an eta on that [Laughter] this project is turned into what i call you know it's my precious yeah um and i've been i've been working on it for 11 years now i've always been interested just from a big picture standpoint around how did the allies turn around their respective train wrecks during 1942 which i do think is the critical year of the war um i don't think that world war ii can be solved one way or the other until all the big dogs are in the fight and it really isn't until you know december of 41 that the us is now in and and frankly from the russian standpoint i think it's an open question as to whether or not russia is going to survive 1942 anyway so i've been working on that i'm hoping to have it done in another i don't know three years something like that i got a ways to go fair enough well yeah keep working we'll keep an eye out for it uh appreciate that let everyone know when it is out okay so we're gonna we're gonna draw a close to this particular interview it's been a great pleasure speaking to you i must say um i've really enjoyed it and hopefully at some point we can we can talk again on on something related um but yeah for now um we'll wrap up this video here and as i said lead if you haven't got a copy of shattered sword well you're watching a naval history channel why do you not have a copy of shattered sword okay maybe kobe slows the post down but it has we've come and we've been living like this for a year there's no that you should have had one by now uh i'll even put in my plug here and say i do sell autographed copies so if you're looking for that special present for someone special you know i can make that happen yeah so men mental note mental thing shipping overseas my most expensive copy ever actually went to a guy in moscow and it cost me a hundred and ten dollars just to ship it there wow you wanted it real bad okay god bless you well maybe maybe we could set up set up something for people on this side of the atlantic because um yeah i've i've worked out something of a transatlantic trade system which but it works it works relatively well but anyway uh wrapping up here so let's stop the recording that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 222,122

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Jon Parshall, USN, IJN, Battle of Midway, USS Enterprise, USS Yorktown, USS Hornet, Geroge Best, Akagi, Kaga, Nagumo, Hiryu, Soryu

Id: lN79g34wjQA

Length: 63min 26sec (3806 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/124876720]

Submission Statement:

Drachinifel has been providing a fairly rigorous (for YouTube) series of videos on naval warfare which provide a good introduction in an easily-digestible form, especially for busy people. Jon Parshall needs no introduction as one half of the authorial duo behind Shattered Sword, which revolutionised the history of the Battle of Midway. They have a good, interesting discussion here about the battle which I hope this subreddit will enjoy.

[u/BreaksFull]

Drach is capable of being simultaneously providing deeply fascinating content, and also being the perfect white noise machine to fall asleep to.

[u/nightowl1135]

My favorite battle to teach, and I'm an Army guy. Incredible action that was so pivotal in the PTO. I've read 3 or 4 books specifically on it (including Shattered Sword which is fantastic) and many others that had descriptions of it as part of the action, watched several documentaries, both the movies, listened to numerous podcasts and I still occasionally hear new little details and nuances and interesting challenges to long-held beliefs.

[u/DecentlySizedPotato]

I loved that video. I'm still amazed that Drach got a guest of that caliber! If you've read Shattered Sword you probably won't learn much new from the video, except for a couple of details about Hornet's flight to nowhere and a bit more at the end, but it's still very interesting to see Mr. Parshall himself explain it.

And, off topic, Drach's visible excitement at the beginning that he's about to interview Parshall is so wholesome.